Profiling processes without frame pointers

[javierhonduco]

Lately, we've been working on improved stack walking for native processes, such as C, C++, or Rust. We've implemented a brand new profiler in BPF that can unwind stacks without frame pointers. If you are curious about how it works, there's a blog post coming soon!

Give it a try!

This feature is enabled by default, so it should work out of the box.

Features

• Languages: we have tested this new unwinder on C and C++ applications compiled with GCC and Clang. It should work with Rust applications too, as long as the ELF .eh_frame section is produced. This information is typically produced by default. For C compilers, we recommend ensuring that -funwind-tables and -fasynchronous-unwind-tables are not disabled.
• Architecture support: x86_64 only at the moment.

(A more comprehensive list of features and limitations lives here).

Let us know if you have any feedback, want to report any bugs, or have any feature requests!

[javierhonduco]

This is fully shipped and stable for x86_64. Many of our users are running it in production without issues.